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Definitions and References
“In Buddhism, the skandhas (or “heaps”) are five interconnected components that make up the human experience. They are form (physical existence), sensation (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feelings), perception (recognition and interpretation), mental formations (thoughts, emotions, and concepts), and consciousness (awareness and knowing). Together, these skandhas create our sense of self and reality, but Buddhism teaches that they are constantly changing, impermanent, and devoid of a fixed, essential self – a key insight on the path to enlightenment.”
In Buddhism, dependent origination (also known as pratityasamutpada) describes the principle that all phenomena arise in dependence upon other factors and conditions. It’s a twelve-linked chain of causes and effects that explains how suffering and the cycle of birth and death (samsara) occur. The twelve links start with ignorance and proceed through various mental and physical processes, ultimately leading to suffering. The key idea is that everything exists in relation to something else and is empty of inherent existence, highlighting the impermanent and interconnected nature of reality. This understanding is central to Buddhist philosophy and the path to liberation.
Joshua Cutchin’s Fourth Wall Phantoms is many things, but in this context the major takeaway is that, functionally, Jungian Archetype clusters are ‘sentient’ in a manner of speaking, and seek out
lives to express them, either in a human body, or even Independently as a ‘phantasm’ (projection
of some sort, such as a folklore, mythical, cryptological or Ufological ‘incursion’ from the lands of
the ‘cosmic unconscious mind’ into the ‘physical world’.
Hyperobject:
“A hyperobject, as defined by philosopher Timothy Morton, is an object so massively distributed in time and space that it transcends typical human scales of perception and comprehension. We can interact with its local manifestations, but we can never fully grasp its totality.
Think of them as vast, encompassing entities that are too big, too complex, or too spread out for us to directly experience as a whole.
Here are some key characteristics of hyperobjects:
- Viscous: They “stick” to other objects, influencing them even when not directly observed. Like oil clinging to feathers, their effects are pervasive.
- Nonlocal: They are not confined to a specific place. Their manifestations can be felt across vast distances.
- Temporally Phase: They exist across vast spans of time, far exceeding human lifespans. They were here before us and will likely be here long after.
- Phased: They manifest in different ways at different times and in different locations. We only ever encounter slices or aspects of them.
- Interobjective: They are formed through the interactions and relationships between numerous other objects. They are not isolated entities.”
Memes and Memeplexes
Susan Blackmore defines a meme as a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation, such as ideas, behaviors, styles, or catchphrases, that are passed from person to person within a culture. A memeplex, on the other hand, is a complex of memes that have evolved together to form a more or less coherent whole, often with a mutually supportive relationship that enhances their chances of replication and survival. Memeplexes can include large sets of ideas, like religions or scientific theories, that consist of many interconnected memes that work together to propagate and perpetuate themselves.
Platonic Surrealism Fundamentals
Definitions
Platonic Surrealism (PS)
A Neoplatonic framework with strong elements of Neutral Monism, Analytical Realism and Natural Scientific Concepts (pre-corruption of Scientism). The purpose of the framework is to be a tool to help heal very damaged mystics and ‘Experiencers’ and to act as a research launchpad for future humans who wish to unfold their actual potential, not just the awful ‘party-line’ that culture imprints forcibly on all of us. It is admittedly deconstructive, but equally constructive. PS considers itself to be like the ‘Foundation’ in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire series, and a more complete continuation/refresh of the work of the giants who came before such as Plato and Nietzsche to name just a couple.
POTENTIALITY:
The sum total of all possibilities, unexpressed, and all the possible interaction sets those properties could have if expressed. POTENTIALITY is timeless and formless but is the highest order ‘cosmic field’ which contains all the seeds of what is possible).
AWARENESS:
The ability to reflect, to be sentient. The ability to form and conceive causal links between potential and active properties. AWARENESS is a cosmic scale ‘field’ in a manner of speaking).
PRIMORDIAL CONSCIOUSNESS:
The sum total of all the ruminations of AWARENESS about the passive properties of POTENTIALITY, without acting upon any of it).
Fractured CONSCIOUSNESS:
(see Deception.) When AWARENESS ponders subsets of PRIMORDIAL CONSCIOUSNESS as mediated by ‘space and time’, you get a highly fragmented result, all of it pretty much SURREALISTIC, incomplete and inherently painful and confusing.
DECEPTION:
(see “The Laws of Physics”.) The primary creative power, since only one thing actually exists (POTENTIALITY) but so that things might SEEM to appear to exist, which certainly IS a subset of ‘POTENTIALITY’, you need DECEPTION as “The only law of physics”.
THE LAWS OF PHYSICS:
A temporary island of stability, largely based on mathematical properties and interactions dreamed up by a subset of PRIMORDIAL CONSCIOUSNESS and the ordering by AWARENESS as mediated by Monads.
Monads:
A ‘quantum’ (please don’t scream mainstream science, its just a metaphor, not pseudoscience) of the minimum ability to perform functions of AWARENESS as it mediates between POTENTIALITY and PRIMORDIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, and between PRIMORDIAL CONSCOUSNESS and particular ‘space-time pallets’ created as a workspace. Monads have the ability to retain information, to ‘remember’ a unique perspective that starts at the ‘birth’ of the Monad and continues until a Monad decides to ‘stop curling awareness back on itself to see itself’ and thus cease existing. Metaphorically you may consider Monads to be ‘Boltzmann Brains’ situated between timeless and time-full regions of what potentially or supposedly actively exists.
Overview
You know, from a ‘Fourth Wall Phantoms’ perspective, Buddhism’s ‘Skandhas are archetypes looking for humans to live them. [A reference to Joshua Cutchin’s latest book by that title]
Has everyone noticed, that when you have a cluster of skandhas that have marked you strongly, that when you meet someone else with the same marked tendency that you feel a shared bond with them, perhaps without even talking to them? The bond may be one of liking them or disliking them
or both at once!
Nature is efficient. In a sense there may only be one set of skandhas, and we all share in it, who are expressing that skandhas, rather than having separate copies of it?
This would be yet another example of hyperobjects.
in a sense, WE ARE ALL SUMMONED BEINGS.
Correlations with Platonic Surrealism Fundamentals
In Platonic Surrealism (PS), generally discuss how singular or groups of Monads ‘project moviesscapes’ and then beam ‘AWARENESS’ into the moviescape (‘universe’) like an artist’s
pallet, for the purpose of fulfilling their deepest urge, that being to experience EVERYTHING IN POTENTIALITY from which they formed and not just ‘experience’, but to LIVE as that ‘thing in and of itself’ (i.e. as a limited human being as one example). This is a reference to the philosopher Kant.
Well in PS, we tend to stop right there, and not use the Sight to look even deeper, but a deeper layer of comprehension certainly exists.
In short, Monads and groups of Monads are ultra-efficient of course, and don’t ‘recreate the wheel at least not in its totality’.
They in fact ‘hot link’ to an existing occurrence of a Buddhist Skandha, rather than necessarily making a fresh copy.
This is how/why ‘Buddhist Skandahs’ are hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are everywhere and
may also be confused or conflated with ‘holographic reality models. Really, it’s hard to say where
the boundaries are between hyperobjects, memes, memeplexes and holographic templates.
This is the very reason that we as humans can understand each other through Archetypes and Mythic POTENTIALS in POTENTIALITY.
This mechanism binds us all together, as UNBOUND beings pretending to be bound within the associational webs of ‘time’.
We are in fact bound together by our ‘perfection’ in primordial consciousness AND bound together through our hyperobject links of fractured consciousness as well.
Kevin Cann
Public Domain
4/28/2025